


Pulse

by enigma731



Category: Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Community: be_compromised, Existential Crisis, F/M, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 10:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been a long time since Natasha's really thought of herself as human. Humans grow old; their lives have an end. Hers stretches toward an empty horizon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pulse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SugarFey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/gifts).



> Written for the be_compromised summer promptathon 2013. Thank you to [samalander](http://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander) for beta, and also for telling me not to burn this draft when I wanted to. :p Canon-wise, this is a 616/MCU fusion heavily inspired by Name of the Rose.

The moment Natasha realizes she loves Clint Barton is nothing special, nothing unique.

She’s sitting across from him in the greasy little Manhattan diner that’s rapidly becoming something like a tradition they share. He’s been her partner for three years, thirty-six months of fighting and killing and fucking away the pent-up adrenaline.

Later she won’t be able to say what it is that’s changed—something in his bizarre ritual of eating post-mission breakfast, like the key to the parts of her mind she still can’t understand might lie somewhere at the bottom of a plate. Natasha watches the deftness of his fingers as he cuts up a sausage and spears a piece onto a forkful of syrup-drenched french toast, and suddenly she can’t imagine her life without the easy comfort of his presence, without the good humor that takes her outside of herself, makes her feel whole in a way that she never has been. 

“What?” asks Clint, when he catches her staring at him, food halfway to his mouth as though he can somehow sense the change in the air between them.

Natasha shakes her head and lets the thought fade into the cheerfully empty din of the busy restaurant.

* * *

“What are you doing?” he asks, when she traps him against the entry way of her apartment and kisses him.

Sex has been strictly a follow-up to killing for years now, hard and fast and confined to safe houses or hotels like another tool for the job, another innumerable mask. 

“I want you,” she says simply, and lets him read in her eyes that she means more than partners, more than friends. More than _whatever_ they’ve been until now, when that traitorous part of her heart crossed the proverbial line in the sand.

Clint has been in love with her for months. He isn’t even subtle about it, though of course he thinks he _is_. He swallows.

“Don’t you?” asks Natasha, when he stays quiet.

“Hell yes,” says Clint, bringing callused fingers up to brush her jaw. “Just—“

“What?”

“Don’t you think you could do better than a middle-aged carnie with a divorce settlement and a death wish?”

Natasha rolls her eyes and marvels at his flair for the melodramatic. “Technically,” she says, “I’m more than twice your age.”

* * *

Later, when they’re in her bed, her thighs wrapped around him and his cock filling her, the fear creeps in. She moves more slowly than she ever has before with him, letting herself savor the rough slide of his fingers on her, the little hitch of his breath with every thrust.

Clint rolls his head back on her pillow, baring his throat to her. Natasha leans down to kiss the exposed skin, runs her tongue along his pulse point, and that’s when everything shifts again. 

For the first time she becomes aware of the fragility of his life, of the trust he’s giving her in this moment. She feels the beat of his heart throbbing under her mouth and thinks of the day when it won’t anymore, when his body will be still and cold and buried in the ground. 

She’s lived enough years for a lifetime and then some, has watched people age and fade and die around her, but it’s never mattered before because she’s never needed anyone but herself. 

It’s been a long time since she’s really thought of herself as human. Humans grow old; their lives have an end. Hers stretches toward an empty horizon.

“What is it?” asks Clint, because he never misses the little ripples beneath the surface of her mind, no matter how well she tries to keep them hidden.

“Nothing,” says Natasha, and sinks her teeth into the hollow of his throat.

* * *

It’s like an itch, like acid under her skin, this terrible knowledge that she can’t seem to shake.

The Red Room taught her how to keep her fears at bay, how to pack her emotions into a little black box and burn the key. 

Only now she can’t bring herself to do it, can’t make herself forget for the present, because the idea of being blindsided by a gaping Clint-shaped hole in the center of her life is worse than the prospect of an eternity waiting for tragedy to come.

Instead she counts breaths and heartbeats in moments of quiet, days slipping through her fingers like grains in an hourglass.

* * *

“Fuck,” mutters Clint, after a particularly grueling sparring session, rolling his shoulder as he grimaces in pain. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

It’s not the first time he’s had this complaint after a workout; in the past Natasha would have teased him for it, would have called him ancient until he threw himself back in and took her to the mat. But today it’s only a reminder of everything she’s been trying to forget, and she can’t help thinking of the day when he’ll retire, when he’ll be a memory instead of her partner. 

She swallows down the thought and gets to her feet, abandoning her own stretches to work her fingers into his knotted muscles, trying to root the tension out like she might be able to take the weight of time from his shoulders as well.

“What are you doing?” asks Clint, frowning, because this is undoubtedly the last thing he’s come to expect from her.

“Making you stop whining,” says Natasha, and tries to focus on her task.

* * *

Uncertainty is an insidious thing, snaking tendrils curling around every still moment of the day, lurking just beyond every flush of pleasure, every tug of affection, reminding her that loss is coming. 

She begins to think about it on missions as well, in the moments between planning and fighting, in the private corners of her mind that never quite become her cover. 

Natasha collects worst-case scenarios, ways that Clint could be killed on each job, under each new set of circumstances. Ways that she could, too. 

She stopped fearing her own death years ago, but suddenly the possibility feels uncharacteristically welcome.

* * *

Sometimes she watches him sleep when she’s lying awake in the middle of the night, her doubts too loud in her ears. She catalogs the signs of mortality in the moonlight, the hint of gray in his hair, the lines etched in his forehead by years of concentration. 

She thinks again of his death and for a moment wishes perversely for it to come, for the worst to be over. Suddenly it feels like the only escape from the paralysis of uncertainty, of waiting, of never knowing exactly when it will come. Natasha longs for her usual control, the power she’s learned to find in making her own fate. 

She runs her fingers along the cool hilt of the knife she keeps concealed between mattress and bedframe and thinks of what it would be like to kill him, to slit his throat and feel his blood hot and sticky between her fingers. She wonders whether it would set her free.

* * *

She’s been wrapped up in dread for nearly three months when she finally gets her chance. They’re in Damascus on an intel run when Clint is captured. It takes her more than an hour to locate him and fight her way in, and she knows without question that it’s too long.

He’s on the ground by the time Natasha gets to him, and so still that for an instant she thinks the end is already past, that he is already gone and she’s through to the other side of waiting. 

She feels the hot pressure of grief close around her throat as she crosses the room, and she tries to tell herself that she’s prepared for this, that it ought to be some measure of relief to have arrived at this place at last, to be able to begin picking up the pieces. She reaches for the familiar temptation she’s felt in hours of darkness and fear and doubt, but in this moment finds nothing.

But Clint is still breathing, she realizes when she kneels beside him, though not for long. His shirt is gaping open to reveal a devastating knife wound. Someone’s dragged a blade ruthlessly across his abdomen, and her own stomach lurches painfully when she realizes that she can see a glimpse of intestine through the flaps of muscle and skin that hang flaccid like shredded silk. He’s already surrounded by a pool of blood, and she knows it’s arterial from the vibrant red. 

“Clint,” she says reflexively, and is surprised when his eyes flutter open, dark and frantic with pain. “Stay with me.”

Natasha tears strips of fabric from the remains of his shirt, tries to make a compress though she knows there isn’t enough cloth in the world to stop bleeding like this. Clint cries out in agony when she tries to put pressure on the wound, a ragged, inhuman sound that seems impossible coming from him.

“Stop,” he pants when she’s pulled back a little, his hand shooting out to close weakly around her wrist.

“I have to,” says Natasha, the strained sound of her voice a fresh shock in her ears. “Transport’s less than ten minutes away. If we can just slow the bleeding—“It still won’t be enough, she knows, but she isn’t willing to consider any of the other options, not even after a lifetime of wishing.

“I can’t,” Clint pleads, his voice barely more than a reedy breath of desperation, but somehow his fingers manage to grasp the gun she’s discarded on the ground. “Please, Tash. Just do it.”

It feels as though she’s watching from outside herself as her fingers take the gun and level it at his head. And finally— _finally_ —for one illusory moment the power over this is hers. 

She could do it, could pull the trigger and end his pain, could be finished waiting, wondering, could be free of the fear and uncertainty. She could be reborn in grief, could remake herself into the woman she was once, who felt nothing save for the rush of a kill. 

Natasha takes a breath and brings the cold metal of the gun down against his temple instead, watching the muscles of his jaw go slack as consciousness falls away from him. Then she presses shaking fingers to his throat, clinging to the faint, thready throb of his pulse as her own heartbeat thunders in her ears.

* * *

Clint doesn’t die. This time.

Natasha sits in silence, blending into the white walls and the unforgiving fluorescent lights as she watches the medical team work desperately to put his body back together again. She watches his chest rise and fall under the artificial pressure of machines, watches fever and pain and convulsions ravage his body. She feels every last shred of control slip away. She’s drowning in the tide of his fate, she thinks, her own future irrevocably ensnared with his, and nothing in the world can make her let go now.

It takes eleven days before the doctors make the decision to lift the sedatives and let him come back to himself. Natasha pulls her chair up to the side of the bed and thinks that it’s the most vulnerable position she’s ever put herself in as she takes his hand in both of hers, runs the pad of her thumb across the long lines in his palm.

“Thought I was dead,” he says, when he’s managed to open his eyes and find his voice.

“So did I,” Natasha admits, and bends to press a kiss to his forehead.

“Why didn’t you do it?” he asks, and she knows he’s remembering the gun, remembering his desperate plea.

She’s quiet for a long moment before speaking again. “Because it wasn’t time. And I don’t want to do this without you.”

Clint studies her, understanding settling in his eyes even through the haze of medication and pain. “ _That’s_ what you’ve been afraid of.” And of course he’s noticed, though she’s said nothing.

Natasha rests her head on his shoulder gently, ignoring the sting of tears in her eyes. There’s nothing she can say to deny it, nothing anyone can do to negate the terrible truth of it. No answer, no strategy, no miraculous salvation. She wonders for a fleeting moment whether this is what it’s like to feel truly human.

“I’m not going anywhere,” says Clint, squeezing her hand weakly. “Not now, not ever. I’ll be three hundred years old. A fossil. And you’ll still look like you. Anyone ever tell you that’s really fucking unfair?”

It’s a lie, but it’s a beautiful one. For the moment, she laughs.


End file.
